Dear-Editor

Just a note folks about voter registration. I called the Auditor’s Office yesterday to make sure I had the information correct.

Anybody who wants to register to vote in the 9/19 primary election needs to hand carry their voter registration form to the Auditor’s Office and be prepared to show proof of identity. Anybody who wishes to register for the general election (which will occur on 11/7) needs to register by 10/7 unless they hand carry it to the Auditor’s Office.

Please remind people that if they’ve moved or changed their name they need to re-register. Many people don’t realize this, thinking they’ll just go to their old polling place.

The only way we’re going to get the people we want in office and the policies we want approved is to get the people who are disillusioned with government to REGISTER and VOTE. Thanks for your work.
(Suzanne Nott)

Are you a Populist? Do you support the workers, small business and small farmers? Do you believe that people should be able to discuss and mold their own future?

Are you a Corporatist? Do you support big corporations? Many feel that big business has too much control over our government. This has been called Fascism. From 1922 to 1943 Benito Mussolini in Italy formed a coalition of big business and government. He called it Fascism. Adolf Hitler in Germany also came to be called Fascist and included radical totalitarianism, authoritarianism, extreme nationalism & militarism.

Are you a Theocrat? Theocracy describes a government in which a religion plays the dominant role. It sounds like this is what is happening in Islamic countries.
Maybe we should call them Islamo Theocrats, not Islamo Fascists

I think it’s interesting that there are only two countries that have stopped people taking liquids onto planes, Britain and the U.K. After all, Spain had their terrorist train bombing and France had huge Muslim riots but no other country in Europe or anywhere else is doing it.

Could it be that both Bush and Blair have a lot of people unhappy with them, and that to stop people focusing on what is going wrong, they need to keep their citizens focused on terror?

Interesting that right after Lamont beat Lieberman in Connecticut, the alleged London plane terror plot surfaced, even though the UK police wanted to leave it a good bit longer so that they could get more proof and be certain of making a conviction stick. It also turns out it would be virtually impossible to build the sort of bomb they were talking about on a plane.

Equally interesting is the day that a federal judge in Detroit ruled that the NSA wire tapping program violated the Constitution, we find JonBenet Ramsey completely taking over the news cycle. Now it looks like John Mark Karr may by a weirdo and not the killer.

Be wise, don’t be suckered!

Call your Senator to tell them to stop the IRS outsourcing the collection of our taxes. This is not the best use of our tax money as private companies will be paid a percentage of what they collect and have executives to pay and advertising to do.

The IRS isn’t telling us that on Aug 31st they will be turning over the first 40,000 taxpayer files to 3 private sector debt collection companies who will receive a bounty of up to 24% of the money they collect. This means that our very private information will end up in easily accessed expensive public companies rather than with cost efficient federal career professionals.

In pilot studies, people were subjected to harassment from companies that were looking to pick up their bounty. Check out: National Treasury Employees Union www.nteu.org

This Administration is also trying to cut in half the amount of IRS agents that look into trusts and the wealthy, while paying these private bill collectors to focus on middle class families! It’s all part of the ‘powers that be’ plan build up the wealthy class while drowning the Government.

Dear Editor (The Olympian)

Republican political attacks on Democrats during last week’s terror threat were outrageous.

Let’s not forget that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch, that the CIA went to Crawford while the president was on vacation to discuss the reports that Al Qaeda was about to attack, and was told “all right, you’ve covered your ass now”. They have just disbanded the special Bin Laden unit.

The 9/11 commissioners said Iraq is distracting from security at home and the Republican Congress hasn’t followed through on their recommendations. We still don’t check baggage in the cargo hold of planes and only 5% of cargo ships are being checked. Katrina showed that we’re not safe.

Iraq has inflamed the whole Middle East and is attracting new Al Qaeda recruits.

Dear Editor

In his Guest Commentary last week entitled, Three Words: Location, tradeoff, cost, Don Brunell cautions moving ahead too quickly on Initiative I-937 for Clean Renewable Energy. Never-mind the 3500 people who volunteered to collect signatures, the 336,000 that signed the initiative and the Washington Public Utility Districts Association, League of Women Voters, former BPA Administrator Randy Hardy, U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee and Adam Smith, Audubon WA, NW Energy Coalition and the state's Lutheran Public Policy Office who all thoughtfully endorsed it.

Washington State voters are not alone in wanting cleaner energy. 20 other states (including Texas) have already passed similar initiatives and are either meeting or exceeding their goals with no more than 1% fluctuation of prices.

The initiative would require we get at least 15% of our energy from renewable sources like wind, solar and conservation by 2020. That gives us FOURTEEN years to do this!

Brunell mentions that Hydropower is excluded from the Initiative. That was done for a reason. We need other sources of energy because snow-pack levels are fluctuating, and with population growth, hydropower is under pressure.

Location: As for ruining scenic vistas, I doubt that conservation groups like the Audubon Washington would have endorsed the Initiative if they felt wind farms would cause an environmental nightmare.

Tradeoff: We will definitely need more energy. Apparently littering the landscape with pollution-spewing coal plants is more environmentally friendly! Personally, I would rather see a vista of majestic wind turbines using free energy than huge offshore oil rigs.

Cost: Puget Sound Energy recently purchased two wind farms after determining that doing so would save $170 million over the next cheapest new power source of any kind - so much for penalizing ratepayers.

Clean coal technology is very expensive, the government is dropping the ball on funding it with only one prototype planned to be up and running by 2008 -- and it cannot be used everywhere. The ground under some coal mines won’t take the carbon being pumped back into it. Nuclear sounds clean, but it’ll take 10 years, a lot of subsidies and dirty energy to make it happen and then what do we do with the spent fuel. (Whose back yard can we dump it in for 10,000 years and whose going to pay for it to be guarded? Oh, I know, let’s use it as depleted uranium and fire it at unarmed civilians in other countries and ruin their DNA and our troops DNA while we’re at it - not printed).

I-937 will not “force” any utility to buy tidal or ocean power. It is an option that has plenty of time to work, along with wind power, solar, biomass, landfill gas, geothermal, biofuels and most importantly “conservation”.

Can we do it? I should think so. There’s a huge surge in businesses looking to get into the field. That will mean lots of new good paying jobs for Washingtonians. Farmers can earn $5,000 per windmill per year and they can farm the land below if they want. There are solar water heating & electricity technologies that homeowners and businesses can use that will cut their need for power. These technologies will be very appealing as they come with rebates, no sales tax and will cut electricity bills and thanks to I-937 they can sell electricity back to the grid. This is already happening in Germany and other countries. How about local communities creating their own solar collector stations where they can create energy for their towns and again sell unused energy units back to the grid, keeping money in the local economy. The PUD’s will be able to count on those sources of energy.

Let’s not give in to a “sky is falling” attitude when we have 14 exciting years to create this new technology.

Thanks to John Dean’s latest book, Conservatives without Conscious I am beginning to understand what is pulling this country apart. Dean was former White House counsel to President Nixon.

In the early ‘50’s Barry Goldwater helped define the Republican Party. He was seen as a radical reactionary saying “We must assure a society which, while never abandoning the needy or forsaking the helpless, nurtures incentives and opportunity for the creative and the productive”, and “this is a party, this Republican Party, a Party for free men, not for blind followers, and not for conformists”.
He philosophy energized the conservative grass roots movement which helped nominate Ronald Reagan. He ended up criticizing the influence of the Christian Right. We seem to have lost track of Goldwater’s party and Dean says that Goldwater would now be seen as center left.

It feels like we are being asked to focus on only divisive issues in black and white, like the war, abortion, birth control, stem cell research, Terri Schiavo and gays, when there are so many issues we as a nation are likely to agree on.

How about following the true teachings of Jesus to help our fellow man by, as an example, raising the minimum wage across the country from $5.15 an hour, (it’s over $7.50 in WA) instead of only supporting the top 7500 families in this country by cutting the Estate/Death Tax.
Let’s discuss Health Care for all, as seen in every other industrialized nation, and what about cheaper Medications?
How about substantial federal support of Renewable Energy instead of even more incentives for dirty technologies?
Should we have federal money spent on Port Security, on well outfitted Military and well looked after Vets?
Shouldn’t small business rebuild New Orleans rather than Halliburton & friends? We could have had Iraq rebuild itself. Let’s not allow war profiteering.
Let’s have non-partisan Government accountability, honest lobbying and less corporate money in our elections which would mean our congress people could spend more than 80 days working on the people’s business and less days scouring the country for contributions.
Let’s give real incentives to small family farms and not to hugely profitable farm conglomerates. Having privatized everything and let monopolies reign, we watch prices get higher with no competition. Let’s have more real free market capitalism with less corporate monopolies.
How about a non-partisan well funded FEMA, EPA, FDA, funding of PBS & NPR, federal help for more rounded and interesting education for our children, not promising funds and then leaving states to foot the bill.
Let’s not give tax breaks to already hugely profitable corporations when we all pay our full share. Let’s have some oversight on the $8.4 trillion deficit and let’s have an economy that really works for all hard working families not just the wealthiest amongst us.
How about Freedom from being spied on by our government, and most importantly, a free press rather than biased corporate owned press & media?

This Republican congress has been in power for 12 years and the administration for 6 years. They have moved from Barry Goldwater’s philosophy of “It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people” to an Ideology that this country should be governed by a small group of wealthy people and corporations so that the decision making of this county is concentrated in wealth and power, not in We The People.

“Naturally, the common people don't want war, but they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. Tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and endangering the country. It works the same in every country”. - Herman Goering, Hitler's Reichsmarschall at the Nuremberg trials

What can Yelm do to join the rest of the World?

Republican Majority Whip Roy Blunt says: “If I Stay In Charge, Congress Won’t ‘Do Anything Meaningful’ On Climate Change”.

In spite of him, 61 House members – including Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA) – have co-sponsored Henry Waxman’s Safe Climate Act which is a serious and practical effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair joined with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and dozens of mayors from some of the world’s largest cities to announce an initiative to combat climate change and increase energy efficiency. London Mayor Ken Livingstone says “Our goal is simple. We want to change the world”.

At least Washingtonians are on the front lines having put I-937 for Renewable Energy on the ballot this November.